The Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Increasing the Psychological Flexibility of Infertile Females: Designing a Therapeutic Protocol

Disability in pregnancy is one of the saddest incidents in female’s lives that affects the physical and mental health of infertile females. The purpose of the present study was to design a protocol based on acceptance and commitment of infertile females and its clinical efficacy on increasing the psychological flexibility of this group.
The study was of a quasi-experimental type with pre-test and post-test. The study population consisted of all infertile females that had referred to the Tabriz Milad Infertility Clinic in the spring of 2015. Thirty of participants that had a score of below average in the questionnaire psychological flexibility (acceptance and practice) were randomly assigned to two experimental groups. After design of protocols, resources on infertile acceptance and commitment therapy related to psychological and emotional mood disorders were studied. In consultation with ACBS members, this protocol was implemented in eight sessions for the experimental group and the control group did not receive any intervention. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test was used to analyze the data.
The mean scores of the experimental group in the pre-test was lower than the mean scores of the control group. However, in the post-test, the mean scores of the experimental group were higher than the control group. The main effect of inter-in-person variance analysis was presented for the experimental and control groups. The F value for both groups was 0.41, which is significant at the level of 0.04 (P According to the results, the present treatment protocol was affective for increasing psychological flexibility of females with infertility.